Introduction

As a student of community organizing at the UCLA School of Social Welfare, my mentor was
Professor Warren Haggstrom, who had what has always seemed to me an engaging view of Los Angeles
as a polity. He once said that, "Los Angeles can be understood best as an underdeveloped city, complex in
the sense that large dinosaurs were complex, without being very adequately guided by its own ideas." That
was more than 25 years ago, but the comparison is more apt now than ever. And his insight is just the tip
of the secession-momentum iceberg. There's a long list of reasons why the City of Los Angeles shouldn't
be the exclusive local government for millions of citizens--the secessionists certainly have that right. But
before we consider why secession is such a misguided idea, let's consider how it has gained so much
momentum.

Demise of Local Government

While the city continues to grow larger and more ungovernable, the means of its governance--the City of
Los Angeles, the Council, the Mayor, and the bureaucracy--remain virtually unchanged. Fifteen people
continue to hold all of the public powers that are essential to govern 3,694,820 of us in the City,
notwithstanding the launching of advisory neighborhood councils. There hasn't been any discernable shift
in who controls the powers to enact ordinances, police, regulate, tax, spend, contract, incur indebtedness,
or exercise eminent domain. These powers over millions of us remain in the hands of a handful.

During the course of the last century, cities throughout the country generally and Los Angeles in
particular grew into bureaucratic behemoths though relentless annexation of small towns and
municipalities within their potential "sphere of influence." The San Fernando Valley was once home to a
number of small town governments. The net effect of their demise is "local government"--"THE CITY
OF LOS ANGELES"--that cannot meaningfully be described as local or government, at least insofar as
those terms suggest accessibility and inclusive political participation. With gigantic constituencies, our so-called local government officials have fled the political arena of citizen dialogue and decision-making
about civic affairs, except for public relations purposes, effectively becoming members of a public board of
directors that oversees their centralized bureaucratic enterprise. Mandated by a meager minority of the
eligible electorate to supervise public monopolies, they're mostly involved in negotiating compromises
with well-organized and endowed elites, pluralities, and special interests. Real estate, construction, and
development interests, banking and finance institutions, unions, and the like, have become the citizenry
served by the City's bureaucratized polity. Certainly we don't have anything that remotely resembles what
less than a century ago was called "local government."

The colossal size of our centralized and bureaucratized city government, as a means not only to deliver
services but also to regulate and rule politically, obviates the demands of representation as we usually
understand them. With voting constituencies in the hundreds of thousands, political participation costs for
most of us are exorbitant. Individually trying to influence decisions at City Hall is a Kafkaesque exercise
in futility. Not surprisingly, for those unable to meet the ante--the majority of us whose day-to-day
interests are not meaningfully represented by the high-powered lobbyist-denizens of the City
government--elected officials are objects of fear and scorn: we typically fear them in their presence and
scorn them in their absence. For most of us, local government is an historical artifact.

What's the typical response of our elected City Council members, who "represent" almost a quarter-million of us, when one of us says the City isn't responsive? According to one member of the Council,
"Council members spend all day long responding to things in their district. The danger in the kind of
rhetoric I'm hearing [justifying secession] is that it just obscures the issue of learning to be close to [the
representatives] who can fix things in your neighborhood."(1) In other words, we are presumably to accept
the naïve notion that one representative can adequately serve the needs of almost a quarter-million
citizens--even assuming she's working 24/7. Then we're to accept the arrogant assumption that if a
citizen's needs aren't being met, it must be because he or she doesn't know how to use the system--even
assuming the person has been trying 24/7.

In a manner of speaking, we were forewarned of the consequences of Los Angeles' bureaucratized
polity. After his visit to this country in the early 1830s, the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote
that centralized bureaucracy was the "despotism democratic nations have to fear" in the future. He
described a new type of public organization, for which he acknowledged having no name. He imagined an
organization that would "degrade without [physically] tormenting," a powerful force for social isolation,
undermining community, and becoming the unsatisfactory arbiter and guarantor of equality--while
continuously narrowing the space [i.e., rights, roles, and resources] for civic action until the citizenry is
reduced to "a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."(2)
Seemingly we have arrived at the place Tocqueville imagined.

What is it about bureaucracy that fosters such damnable consequences? The inherent anomaly of a
bureaucratized polity like the City of Los Angeles is its domination by a single center of decision-making.
The result is a complicated, costly, and error-prone system of communication and control. We have an
example in a similar bureaucratized polity, the Unified School District, with the recent revelation of a
$19.3 million expenditure on a contract to buy air conditioners in which the District failed to get a single
air conditioner in the bargain. The problem is accentuated by the City's monopolization of services, which
reduces its sensitivity to large-scale diseconomies.

To the continuous pain and resentment of citizens with low to moderate incomes, those who find it
difficult to move out of the City when its governance is offensive, burdensome, or simply inept, the City
has adopted the practice of defining "producer efficiency" without reference to "consumer utility." In
effect, the City's monopoly has created an incentive to realize cost savings, improving the appearance of
economy, by placing greater burdens on consumers.

Let's say you're not thrilled with the cost of your cable TV service--it's now approaching $50 a month
for the basic package. Where and how do you complain? Take yourself to Room 600 at 120 South San
Pedro Street. How's that for convenience and service? Got a housing code enforcement concern? Try the
main office at 111 North Hope Street. Need a building permit? Go to 201 North Figueroa Street. You say
you don't live near downtown--that's a shame.

Recently I had occasion to call the City because across the street from where I live, a large truck and
trailer rig with very noisy pumping equipment has been disturbing my neighborhood for over a year--a
deep, loud droning all day long, every weekday. A brief survey of some of my neighbors confirmed that
they too are fed up with this noise nuisance. After overcoming the hurdle of identifying the correct official
to contact, I called the individual to request that the City investigate the problem. Regardless of what time
of the day or day of the week I called, there was a recorded response. I left three or four messages, never
received a reply, and finally gave up.

That the movement for secession is gaining momentum reveals nothing more than the logic of
collective action; it's what we should expect people to do in their own self-interest under the
circumstances. But if that's true, why should secession not be the solution? If big is bad, shouldn't smaller
be good? And if secession is not the solution, what's the problem? For starters, it's not whether Los
Angeles should be divided up into a number of smaller cities, which is a no-brainer.

The problem we face is how to determine the most effective form of governance for the massive,
diverse, and growing citizenry within the "natural" political and economic boundaries of the Los Angeles
basin.

Challenges of Empowerment

The challenge in the next decade is to imagine and bring to life a form of government that will politically
empower myriad constituencies and localities, from neighborhoods to districts and beyond to the
metropolitan boundaries, while simultaneously recognizing inescapable demands of economic
empowerment. The secession of mid- to large-size areas, such as Hollywood, San Pedro, and the San
Fernando Valley, will not accomplish either objective. We won't have relieved the alienation of ethnic and
cultural neighborhoods and constituencies from the exercise of public powers, but we will have lost the
economic advantages of metropolitan boundaries for producing "public goods." There is every reason to
think that a new San Fernando Valley city of nearly one and a half million people will simply create
another large, unresponsive bureaucratized polity.

Trying to answer the question of what's the best form of government for Los Angeles pits us against
more than a century of momentum and misinformation that are working against structural reform. From
the late 19th century and throughout the 20th, "municipal reformers" claimed that having many
municipalities within a metropolitan area was politically ineffective and economically inefficient, which
often seemed an accurate observation. And in their time, up to a point, they were right. But now, at the
beginning of the 21st century, we've gone beyond that point. So let's consider why and how that's true.

The earliest and most influential explanations of municipal reform were Woodrow Wilson's
Congressional Government (1885) and Frank J. Goodnow's Politics and Administration (1900). Wilson
believed that the state should have a single center of power, and that constitutional separations and
balances are little more than facade. He argued that as power is more divided it becomes more
irresponsible. Max Weber's writing on bureaucracy supported Wilson's central themes. Weber thought
that bureaucracies are inherently rational and efficient. His belief was that, while government may have
different political objectives, good administration has but one form--hierarchical organization, with top-down authority, directing technically trained civil servants. Its efficiency and effectiveness presumably
could be measured in economic terms: maximum output at minimum cost. And derivative principles of
municipal government have been repeated endlessly ever since. These include widening span of control,
functional departmentalization, unity of command, consolidation of authority in unit heads, and
centralization in a chief executive (or executive group)--all identifiable features of our own City
government.

From the turn of the last century, virtually every major city in the country created a "municipal reform
bureau" to promote these principles of local government.(3) The movement was bankrolled by well-known
industrial capitalists who could see that the big-city political machines could no longer deal with the
increasingly raucous demands of a mushrooming class of urban industrial workers. The municipal reform
principles were rationalized by theory that served distinct capitalist ideological interests, with little or no
scientific foundation. Nonetheless, with ample financial backing and an engaging theoretical rationale,
municipal reformers justified reducing the number of governments within metropolitan areas, increasing
the size of governments, placing greater reliance on hierarchical control, reducing the number of elected
officials, and replacing smaller towns and limited authority special districts with cities and counties
having general authority.

The effect has been to treat citizens in their local communities as incompetent to govern themselves
and to contract together by petition and election to form public organizations for that purpose.
Unfortunately, municipal reformers' claims for improvements in efficiency and effectiveness have not
been borne out. The only scientifically verified advantage has been that in a relatively small number of
instances, the boundaries of the larger city were more economically viable. The political consequences,
however, have been catastrophic. Overall, the municipal reform tradition, as characterized by Vincent
Ostrom, has been "the disease rather than the doctor" of American public administration.(4) If the call was
once to "municipal reform," it ought now be to "reform municipal reform."(5)

The circumstances of our lives as Angelenos present us with a providential question: What are we to
do about our government which, by its very structure, even with the good intentions of those who guide it,
inters hope and spirit, a government that poisons human potential by its alienation of the citizens who
authorize its operation? What are we to do about our City's bureaucratized polity that, with a monopoly on
politics and the production and distribution of public goods, is commonly incapable not only of economy
and efficiency, but equity and accountability as well?

Scientific Public Administration

Contrary to the municipal reform ideology, there is a competing history and scientifictheory and practice
of public administration. Reconstructing from The Federalist the theory implicit in a "compound" federal
republic--our combined system of federal, state, and local governments--Ostrom cites as its
distinguishing feature the balancingof powers rather than their separation.(6) The idea is that in a national
structure of compounded governments, each level of government offsets the powers of the government
above it, so that citizens can act through cities and counties to somewhat balance the states' powers, and
act through the states to restrain federal power. Ostrom proposes that the founders of the nation
consciously employed this compound, polycentric model in preference to the monocentric British state.

Recognition of the compound federal structure as a stable and productive polycentric system, composed
of a vast number of independent yet federated governments, is the first and essential step in developing a
21st century vision for urban government, retrieving it from the domination of centralized bureaucratic
monopolies.

Polycentric theory is the conceptual foundation for what is now known as "public choice" political-economics. Over the past several decades, political-economists have been examining various
organizational patterns for producing public goods and services.(7) They take public choice or demand, in
contrast to expert determinations of need, as their basic unit of analysis.(8) Their goal has been to assay the
outcomes of different organizational decision-making arrangements. They don't conclude that all
polycentric systems are productive but that we may optimize them by varying the dimensions of their
design.

Going beyond municipal reform measures of organizational performance that are based on the ratio of
goods produced to their production costs, public choice political-economists look at production and
consumption costs. Including consumers' burdens, such as travel and waiting times, ensures that "social"
costs will be included in measures of performance. The complete criteria for evaluating government
performance are efficiency, the ratio of production benefits (output) to costs (input); effectiveness, the
quality of service as a function of cost; equity; the provision of special service to meet special need;
equality, equal service for equal status; and accountability, citizen access and control.

The public choice approach to organizational design is based on a theory of producing public goods.(9)
In a capitalist economy such as ours, goods that can be divided and packaged for consumption according
to individual preferences--toothpaste, sold in small tubes, is the classic example--are usually in the
private economy. Because such goods are divided, however, those individuals who can't or won't pay for
them don't get a share. Purely public goods and services, however, are indivisible and, once produced,
they are (at least theoretically) accessible to everyone whether or not they pay for them. The costs of public
goods and services are apportioned through taxes among the total population (again, at least
theoretically). Water purification, air pollution control, colleges, and armies are examples of indivisible
public goods. The principle isn't absolute because some divisible goods are also produced publicly to
ensure the welfare of the disabled and disadvantaged, to lessen hardship for those who can't pay for
essentials, and when a good or service affects everyone equally by conditioning the total environment, as
with police patrols or mosquito spraying. And, of course, some indivisible goods are produced privately.

"Public bads" are the reciprocals of public goods. The idea is that what an individual regards as a
private good may be a bad when considered as a matter of public interest--say for instance, the Malibu
homeowner who wants to restrict beach access or the teenager who spray-paints gang graffiti on a public
building. While the main goal of urban government is the production of public goods, typically by
increasing the quantity of facilities and services, there is an equally important need to eliminate public
bads. Often the yield from government investment is greater on balance from achieving more effective
usage of facilities, reducing public bads, than by enlarging their quantity. Unfortunately, centralized
bureaucratic governments are notorious for their inability to reduce or eliminate public bads by
influencing public behavior, which is an arena in which face-to-face, grassroots organizations excel.

The need for small-scale jurisdictions with public powers to reduce public bads has never been more
pressing in Los Angeles. The City has frightening levels of gang activity and related crime, coupled with a
centrally directed police force that for too long has been regarded as an "occupying power" by lower-income and working-class ethnic and cultural communities.(10)

Production of a public good involves a "deal" between our government and us (i.e., the taxpayers). The
resulting benefits or burdens that spill over the city's boundaries, affecting people living nearby, are
known as "externalities" or "spillovers." Animal control, paid for by L.A. taxpayers, spills over unearned
benefits outside of the City by preventing stray animals from crossing our boundaries into adjoining cities;
while a power generation plant within the city limits may spill over burdens in the form of wastes that are
buried in another city. Urban public goods differ dramatically in their geographic implications, with
spillover boundaries ranging from neighborhood to region. It's these infinitely variable spillovers of public
goods that we have to take into account when thinking about the most effective form of government for
the metropolitan area that roughly corresponds to the Los Angeles basin.

Each public good or service has an optimum scale of organization for production. Economies of large
scale are associated with capital-intensive production, as with sewage treatment, power generation, water
supply, and mass transportation. Small-scale economies are common with a variety of more labor-intensive activities, such as teaching, maintenance, inspection, and some forms of policing.

Two-Tier Metropolitan Government

We can vitalize city government in Los Angeles not by exchanging our centralized bureaucracy for district
or neighborhood control, but by balancing the existing top-heavy system with grants of public powers to a
lower tier of government. The basic polycentric model for this purpose is two-tier metropolitan
government, dividing public powers and functions along metropolitan and neighborhood boundaries.(11)
Given the presence of counties, metropolitan public authorities, and regional councils of governments, the
most pressing need is to introduce public powers into existing and incipient neighborhood civil
communities. The resulting grassroots empowerment would certainly moot the issue of secession for the
majority.

Regarding predictions that public powers vested in neighborhood organizations will intensify ethnic
isolation and undermine fiscal equity, there is a bottom-up view that is alien to the liberal and progressive
rhetoric that advocates integration forothers at all costs. It is that virtually all whites except those in the
lowest socio-economic classes share the benefits of the present system of mass urban government, not only
to maintain their own exclusive enclaves but also to contain and exploit ethnic ghettos. The view from the
bottom is that there's nothing lamentable about trading the rhetoric of integration for some form of
institutionalized neighborhood empowerment.

Equally not compelling from the bottom-up perspective is the argument that if we grant public powers
to our neighborhoods, the areas with resources, those producing tax revenues, are likely to secede, leaving
those without to fend for themselves. The idea reflects a limited and mistaken conception of urban
government as necessarily centralized or decentralized, rather than polycentric. But in a two-tier
metropolitan federation, empowered neighborhoods are part of a compound structure that includes a
metropolitan government, plus county, state, and federal jurisdictions. It's not possible to secede
unilaterally from their authority--particularly the taxing, regulatory, and judicial powers they
exercise--anymore than San Pedro can unilaterally secede from Los Angeles County. Moreover, across
our contemporary cityscape, the relationship between rich and poor areas is more like exploitation than
charitable benevolence. So low- to moderate-income neighborhoods may have more to gain from
acquiring public powers, winning the rights and resources to manage their own development, than
hanging on to the current system.

But there is a positive answer to predictions of more ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic isolation
from neighborhood empowerment. Unlike the present situation in which our monopolistic city
government tends to deny political rights, roles, and resources to citizens with low to middle incomes,
giving rise to their political irrelevance, the advent of neighborhoods with public powers would offer
practical opportunities for cooperation between disparate communities, each in their own self-interest.
There will always be positive pressures for formal and informal service, mutual aid, and joint powers
agreements in such a polycentric system.

In Los Angeles, or any other city dominated by bureaucratized polity, neighborhoods are often limited
to interacting, at the polls or elsewhere, only in destructive competition or conflict. While both will
undoubtedly always be with us to some degree, granting public powers to neighborhoods in the context of
two-tier metropolitan government would create genuine opportunities for self-interested cooperation. Then
our neighborhoods would not only have the need for cooperation, but also the institutionalized
wherewithal to successfully launch and manage cooperative initiatives with one another.

Lower Tier Empowerment

If the majority of citizens in Los Angeles are to have an effective political voice in the governance of
the City, our neighborhoods will require a mix of public powers. In effect, to successfully govern and
produce public goods and services demands a complex repertoire of organizational capabilities. Like any
successful polity or enterprise, neighborhoods must be able to acquire, transform, and distribute resources.
So it is that authentic expression of our collective political and economic will demands that neighborhoods
have legislative, taxing, and other public powers, although in limited grants that recognize the essential
role of an upper tier of metropolitan government with broader authority and responsibility. These powers,
along with a mandate to contract and assume debt, are essential to vitalize the civic rights and roles of the
citizenry and to capitalize and operate services and enterprises.

How can we accomplish this? There are three variations on neighborhood "empowerment":
administrative decentralization, political decentralization, and by petition and election. They are
distinguished by the direction of their sponsorship, their functions and authority, the extent of their public
powers, and the characteristic ways in which their authority and powers become vested.

Administrative decentralization is easily recognizable from the imprint of its top-down sponsors.
Notwithstanding the so-called decentralization, it amounts to little more than an enlargement of the
existing centralized bureaucracy, an ironic expansion, to fix an already legendary sluggishness. Branches
are established at lower levels, like Boston's "little city halls," serving populations from 50,000 upwards,
with low-level managers granted discretion to "gather input" and implement policies of central decision-makers. The professed goal is to upgrade the distribution of public goods and services, to improve equity
and equality in addition to efficiency and economy, by more accurate measurement of need and targeting
or tailoring of delivery. Such decentralization has a modest effect on the delivery of services--at the least,
travel time to city agencies is reduced--but the character of political rule and bureaucratic decision-making remain obscure and inaccessible to the citizenry. The well-known story of the Roxbury
Neighborhood of Boston and its Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative illustrates the point that the "little
city halls" have no effect on the bureaucratized polity of the city.(12)

Political decentralization is also sponsored from the top down. But it's very different than
administrative decentralization. Limited political authority may be granted to local organizations. The
neighborhood is given a limited franchise for a limited purpose under the supervision of the city. The
heart of political decentralization is not branch-management but devolution of decision-making, limited to
be sure, yet policy-making authority nonetheless. Our new neighborhood councils in Los Angeles,
governed by locally elected representatives, may evolve into this kind of decentralization, acquiring
limited authority for some aspects of the City's programs and services. Sometimes the authority of the
representatives includes a "legislative" mandate, to make decisions on policy options set out by the city.
While some urban political-economists have recommended giving limited taxing authority to these
neighborhood councils, the practice is unheard of and entirely without advocates among big-city mayors
and elected county officials. Political decentralization in its ideal form is a non-starter. Its inescapable
weakness is that by virtue of how it's created, there is no prospect that it will ever encompass essential
public powers, even in limited grants. And as every municipal official knows that it's not possible to
manage citywide government without such powers, the same is certainly true for neighborhood
government.

Petition and election, however, are means by which we the citizenry can directly establish
neighborhood organizations with public powers from the bottom up. In California we have the right of
petition to bring about an initiative or referendum for charter reform. The organizations created by such
actions differ decisively from their top-down-sponsored counterparts. The most important yet least
apparent distinction between devolutionary approaches and these bottom-up methods is their potential to
bring about the vesting of public powers. Unfortunately but predictably, the decentralization of political
decision-making in Los Angeles' neighborhood councils, while potentially a sharing of policy-making
authority, never vests any of the city's public powers in the local councils, even though the councils were
created by charter reform. The same initiative and referendum tools may be used, however, to vest limited
public powers in neighborhoods in such a way that their withdrawal would require extraordinary
conditions and actions, much as would be needed to eliminate cities and counties, because they would
have the public authority to enter into binding contracts.

Thus the potential of granting public powers through initiative and referendum differs from
devolutionary approaches in that neighborhoods so empowered may acquire permanent grants of the
powers that are unique to governments. We may grant them limited entitlements to enact and enforce
ordinances, levy taxes or service charges, exercise eminent domain, carry on policing, etc.

Neighborhood Politics & Economics

What should be the form of decision-making to ensure the democratic expression of the citizens' will?
Should it be a direct democracy--the "open" form of government known to New England towns--in
which every citizen has the right to attend and vote in the town meeting? Or should it be a representative
government, as we have now in Los Angeles, with an elected council of a dozen or so members as
proposed for the new San Fernando Valley city?

The answer hinges somewhat on the ideal size for neighborhood organizations that exercise limited
public powers. Most political-economists have concluded that, given the size of metropolitan areas like
Los Angeles, the minimum scale for empowered neighborhood organizations, usually estimated from
10,000 to more than 100,000, puts the option of direct democracy out of reach. The implicit assumption is
that if neighborhood organizations with public powers were sized to serve populations from 5,000 to
10,000, the ideal for direct democracy and authentic community, some 150 to 300 such jurisdictions
would be necessary in an urban area with a population of one and a half million. The presumption is that
in a two-tier system of metropolitan and neighborhood government, the legislative body for the city, the
equivalent of today's council, would be far too big--assuming that its members would be representatives
elected by the neighborhoods.

But given the political alienation that goes with our "representative" city government, and recognizing
that a single metropolitan area like Los Angeles is in many ways now comparable demographically to the
country as a whole at its founding, the legislative body for the upper tier of our metropolitan government
might more appropriately be an assembly--several hundred neighborhood representatives from
independent neighborhoods. Such a transformation would dramatically increase the accountability of the
City's bureaucratized polity.

The economic argument against neighborhood organizations with public powers sized to serve
populations of 5,000 to 10,000 is that small scale is inherently inefficient for delivery of services. But
polycentric theory and public administration practice both refute this municipal reform mythology. The
theory suggests that efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability in providing public services can be
improved by allocating them among governments of varying sizes. And research confirms, for example,
that urban law enforcement so divided shows gains on virtually all measures of performance. Typical
allocations of police services include: (1) support functions (records, communications, laboratory services,
detention, training, etc.) to the metropolitan area; (2) crime-fighting (capture of criminals, stakeouts,
SWAT activities, etc.) to districts; and (3) maintenance of public order (traffic control, public education,
mediation of neighborhood disputes, etc.) to neighborhoods. Similar divisions have been proposed and
successfully applied to recreation, transportation, social and health services, judicial administration, and
education, with benefits not only from the production of public goods but the elimination of public bads.

If the main arguments against direct democracy and the small scale it demands aren't compelling, the
most prominent ones in favor at least speak to its value and feasibility. They are based on the political
utility of public space and the economic benefits of public enterprise for urban social communities.

Creating Public Space

The most compelling fact of American political life at the beginning of the 21st century is the
extraordinary degree of political alienation, the overwhelming privatization of concerns that were once
thought to be matters of citizen discourse and decision-making. As individuals we no longer have
opportunities to play meaningful parts in decisions of governance, which are reserved to distant and
seemingly dehumanized governments. The familiar theme is frustration of human potential by denial of
power.

The alienation we experience originates in our isolation from power, in our lack of resources to act
effectively in politics and the economy. The result is a decay of the ideas that once united us as a people,
because the old beliefs are no longer reinforced by the outcomes they are supposed to influence. As we can
see all around us, behavior becomes divested of values, moral purpose, and communal goals, leading to
public malaise and obsession with material possessions. We see the evidence of mass alienation in refusal
to vote and the drive for personal position, prestige, possessions, and power--at all costs.

People with low to middle incomes who are not only dissatisfied but want to do something, albeit often
reactionary, either find no way or are steered to positions and roles without power--which undoubtedly
will be one of the debilitating functions of our neighborhood councils, notwithstanding the rhetoric,
hyperbole, and cant surrounding their formation. The councils will not cure the deficit in what was once
called "political liberty," a more familiar expression for what political philosophers refer to as "public
space"--those institutionalized rights, roles, and resources mentioned earlier.

For Jefferson and contemporary commentators too, American independence created new political
liberty but failed to institutionalize public space for its expression in action by the general citizenry, except
for occasional elections. Although the Constitution granted all power to the citizenry, it withheld
opportunities for acting as citizens. Government discussing and deciding, the hallmark of political liberty,
was closed to all but representatives. And the neighborhood councils do nothing effectively to change that
fact.

Jefferson believed this lack of public space was a defect in the structure of the newly established state
and would continue to threaten our nation's welfare. He was convinced that public space is a preventive
measure and antidote to political tyranny, including the bureaucratic variety, and to endless cycles of
insurgency and repression--of which we've had several large doses in the recent history of Los Angeles.
He wrote that without public space as a permanent platform for constructive citizen action, "we shall go
on in the endless circle of oppression, rebellion, reformation; and repression, reformation, again; and so
on forever." The heart of the problem is not poverty but powerlessness--which is the key to curing not
only poverty but oppression and injustice as well.

Jefferson also believed that the presence of directly democratic government within a polycentric system
would ensure that "every man in the state will let his heart be torn out of his body sooner than let his
power be wrested from him by a Caesar or Bonaparte." After his retirement from public life, he advocated
subdividing the counties into "little republics," patterned on New England town governments, most of
which were founded and continue today, nearly four centuries later, as directly democratic popular
assemblies--which the citizens are adamant about retaining as such.

The need for public space has grown rather than diminished over the course of our urbanization
history. Apart from the centralized bureaucracy, the City's system of representation is feeding a vale of
political alienation. It's not difficult to understand how elected officials are recruited to serve special
interests that hold irresponsible power and how the representative system is transformed from a means of
articulating the democratic will to a method for subverting it. Reputable studies confirm the common
sense conviction that voting and government policy are at best remotely related. Predictably, millions of
people intuitively understand that going to the polls is not a remedy for their sweeping powerlessness,
with school bond referendums and initiatives that limit taxes possible partial exceptions.

Our urban decline is marked by deprivation and alienation that result in part from massive scale,
accompanied by the breakdown of political representation and the advent of centralized bureaucratic
organization. We can reasonably expect in coming decades that, as the city continues to grow in
population and conditions worsen for the majority, there will be more frequent and extreme attempts to
initiate and renew broadly based public life. Transforming this energy into constructive action will depend
mostly on our institutionalizing empowering rights, roles, and resources for the general citizenry--the
creation of directly democratic public space and public enterprise.

Fostering Public Enterprise

Our existing laws and traditions, grounded in capitalist interests and ideologies, hinder governments from
engaging in enterprise, which is normally considered the preserve of private, profit-making organizations.
The production and distribution of private (divisible) goods and services in the capitalist economy,
particularly, are excluded from public activity--although not absolutely--which we might regard as a
"preferential option for the rich."(13) It's ironic because we trace our history from the English parishes that
obtained income by brewing beer, renting pews, and other enterprise, and from the colonies that were
founded by commercial exploration companies. But there are more contemporary and convincing reasons
for neighborhood governments to engage in enterprise within the context of polycentric public industry.

Social infrastructure--local organization and the cultural values and beliefs that sustain it--represents
investment in a form of collective capital that serves individuals yet is charged to all the rest of us through
taxation. Our public sponsorship of social infrastructure development bestows unearned benefits on
owners of private capital. The few owners of significant capital enjoy extraordinary advantages, freebies if
you will, from our public investments in social infrastructure. This is verified in cities when such
investments are withheld and the infrastructure begins to disintegrate or disappears altogether. As public
investment in schools, streets, libraries, etc., declines, private enterprise and capital accumulation suffer
setbacks, victims of human resource shortages. There is decay of the labor force, slackening of training,
education, and health care; and failure of public services, from policing and maintenance of streets to mail
service.

Public subsidies to private enterprise, through uncompensated investments(14) in social infrastructure,
create lucrative incentives for more capital-intensive technology and production. Yet there is a deep and
reasoned consensus among radical economists that long-term development of our political economy
requires at least a partial shift away from capital-intensive, socially wasteful industries. Their great
demands for capital, energy, and materials tend to restrict ownership and control to a small minority,
strain government fiscal capacity to the breaking point, generate unmanageable wastes and social
pathologies, and leave idle reservoirs of labor. The alternative is for the public to directly reap some of the
benefits of their investment in social infrastructure by engaging in local less-capital-intensive enterprise,
especially in the service economy.

There are myriad opportunities for publicly sponsored, small-scale, labor-intensive enterprise, offering
practical routes toward economic decentralization of the political economy.(15) Nothing in the U.S.
Constitution prohibits the states from exercising proprietary rights of enterprise, and several--North
Dakota most notably with state banks--have done so. In People of Puerto Rico v. Eastern Sugar
Association (156 F. 2d 316, 1946), the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the Puerto Rican legislature's use of
eminent domain to break up large concentrations of land holdings by sugar companies. The states may
grant these proprietary rights to local governments, either through their chartering, by legislative
enactment or initiative, or via constitutional amendment. State courts have gone so far as to allow
municipalities to engage in commerce beyond their own city limits. Local governments in Michigan, for
example, own and operate housing for the elderly in Florida. An early Ohio court decision allowed a city
to run a railroad across its own boundaries.

Attempts by municipalities in the 19th century to own and operate
utilities were initially branded "gas and water socialism." But nearly 2,000
cities own utility companies. And in the wake of California's recent power
industry chaos, in which only those cities with their own generators didn't face
the threat of rolling blackouts, more than a dozen communities "have considered
abandoning large investor-owned utilities" in favor of operating their own power
plants.(16) Perhaps the most interesting
facet of this development is the consideration being given to "spot utilities,"
taking advantage of the latest noiseless neighborhood generators that can
economically and efficiently serve as few as a dozen homes.

Local governments run printing plants, telephone systems, public baths,
laundries, theaters, markets, and much more. Some own sports teams, and many
others own cable TV systems. At one point, one of the directors of the Golden
Gate Bridge District, the multi-county public authority that also operates a
ferry fleet and bus system, recommended that the District purchase or construct
its own oil refinery, to satisfy its own needs and those of all other public
transportation agencies in Northern California. Once the local government is
granted proprietary authority, it may acquire an enterprise or supplementary
resources either by purchase or eminent domain, although a public purpose must
be served in both cases, and fair compensation made in the latter.

Beyond service-enterprise, intermediate technologies for manufacturing, many of which are byproducts
of international development efforts, make it possible to create less-capital-intensive workplaces. The
application of these technologies by neighborhood organizations raises a hope for relieving what has
become an epidemic of alienation in the workplaces of industrial capitalism, which has not been relieved
for low-wage workers in high-tech, fast-food, or building-maintenance industries. Given the absence of
any economic law that predicts a better capital-to-output ratio by concentrating capital at fewer sites, there
is also a promise of greater total economic productivity.

Development of neighborhood government service enterprises is also likely to have beneficial effects
on alienation and economic output. The decentralization experiments of recent decades have tested and
refined many such enterprises--food cooperatives, daycare centers, community took cribs, job exchanges,
medical clinics, ad infinitum.

Public sponsorship of enterprise, if by directly democratic neighborhood governments, presents the
novel prospect of distant yet feasible long-range opportunities for worker self-management in the U.S., a
direct cure for workplace alienation. The potential for productive worker-controlled, directly democratic
enterprise has been demonstrated repeatedly, in Israel, Yugoslavia, Chile, and elsewhere. The most
obvious approach to integrating self-managed enterprise into neighborhood government is a variation on
the Yugoslavian model, a two-chamber assembly, with popular participation in the "lower house" based
on residence and representation in the "upper house" based on workplace.

Implicit in the incremental vesting of public powers in grassroots organizations is a slow but abiding
tendency to countervail corporate power. The union movement in its early life was an example of how
long-range, bottom-up investment in social infrastructure can refine and consolidate new power, critically
altering relations with the elites that monopolize private capital.

Citizen alienation in Los Angeles--our isolation from decision-making power where we live and work,
where we buy and sell, and where we're governed--promotes a strong bias to directly democratic rather
than representative neighborhood government: it is a brief for public space and self-managed enterprise.
The upper and lower population limits for such "open" government--10,000 and 5,000 respectively--do
not present any insurmountable problems for organizing the upper tier of metropolitan government.

As more social communities arise in the City during the coming decades, primed for organizing by the
downwardly spiraling conditions created by our distant City government and by the effects of mature
industrial capitalism, directly democratic neighborhood government can be the most effective means for
filling the infrastructural void.

Upper Tier Empowerment

Achieving a single, unified upper tier of urban government is more or less problematic according to
the congruence of city and county boundaries, and according to the number of cities within our municipal
boundaries (e.g., Culver City, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and Santa Monica).

When the existing county government corresponds to the area-wide community, the main tasks are to
expand its authority and responsibility, and to transform the structure of executive and legislative offices.
Many metropolitan areas, including San Francisco, have achieved this transformation by consolidating
their city and county. These objectives, seemingly fantastic, are all more feasible if there is parallel
development of public powers in grassroots organizations, even on a modest scale.

The potential for successfully creating a two-tier metropolitan federation in Los Angeles reflects in
part the imagined place of existing special and general-purpose governments. The list of possibilities is
endless, and certainly none are predictable. Except for the possibility of special districts and
municipalities dissolving voluntarily, merging, or consolidating with metropolitan or neighborhood
governments, it must be reasoned that these districts and small cities will continue to represent genuine if
not symmetrical civil communities in the urban political-economy. In the future Los Angeles we may see a
"federal" government, metropolitan and neighborhood tiers predominating, but not excluding the
remaining special districts and smaller cities.

Electoral Options

The pivotal issue in the development of an upper tier is office-holding (or districting), and there are a
number of options worth considering. Metropolitan officials may be named by neighborhood governments
and hold their upper-tier incumbency ex officio. They may be elected from districts that match
neighborhood government jurisdictions. In either case, the legislative body of the metropolitan
government would resemble an assembly, with several hundred representatives. Another option is for the
upper-tier officials to be directly elected from larger districts. Or they may be elected at large.

There are disadvantages and dangers in constituting metropolitan governments as federations of
neighborhood representatives, either ex officio or directly elected, or electing upper tier officials at large.
There is the general drawback of focusing disproportionate attention on either neighborhood or
metropolitan concerns. On the one hand, there's the disconcerting possibility of a metropolitan
government of neighborhood representatives bogged down in ceaseless conflict, pursuing narrow interests
without let-up, absent any institutionalized representation of larger geo-political interests. On the other
hand, the dangers of at-large elections for metropolitan government are high-cost election campaigns,
resulting in severe financial burdens and restriction of office-seeking to a select few--coupled with the
tendency to undermine the voting power, in metropolitan elections, of sizable minority constituencies,
usually Latino, African American, and low-income.

There is an at-large electoral system that ensures representation of multiple constituencies exactly in
proportion to their voting strength.(17) This "proportional representation," unfortunately, is somewhat
complex in operation and has been slow to gain public support as a reform measure in the U.S., although
it has gained acceptance in Europe.(18) In general, such a system would be based on the introduction of
partisan parties into local government elections. The parties would win seats in the legislative assembly in
proportion to their share of the popular vote.(19)

Electoral districting of the upper tier in metropolitan government, on the scale of existing voting
districts, with constituencies of 50,000 to 500,000, may be most likely and most desirable. Such districting
is probable because of the bias to the interests of current elected representatives and their constituencies;
it's desirable because, given the choice between at-large representation that favors "metropolitanism" and
neighborhood representation that favors "localism," it offers a means for building district-wide alliances
and resolving intergovernmental conflicts.

Insofar as neighborhood and metropolitan governments are organized and begin to operate in coming
decades as compound structures, their successes in meeting the challenges of urban governance will
reflect the linkages between them. There must be institutionalized communication channels and decision-rules, integrated in a system of mutual understandings, and sanctioned by state laws, formal contracts, and
other covenants that define their respective domains and terms of interaction. One of the most important
issues is how fiscal resources are to be divided.

Fiscal Considerations

A sizable part of the conflict between local governments revolves around capturing fiscal resources. The
problem in urban areas is that the tax base varies unevenly across jurisdictional boundaries. There is
"cutthroat intergovernmental competition" to internalize (take in) resources and to externalize (throw out)
problems and costs, through boundary changes, legislative mandates, or other available means. The result
is a persistent mismatch between needs and resources.

The economic challenge in distributing resources is defining and assigning costs and benefits of fiscal
flows, which are the underpinnings of equalization strategies. Economic activities spill over political
boundaries, with people living and working and playing--always earning and spending--in different
government jurisdictions. Consider a small municipality within a metropolitan area, an enclave city that
attracts a new shopping center development. It then adds a sales tax of one percent. If the center attracts
shoppers in large numbers from adjoining jurisdictions, sufficient sales tax revenues may be received for
the small city to significantly lower its property tax. Some of the new revenue is consumed, of course, in
providing police, fire, lighting, and other services to the new development.

The task when assigning costs and benefits of fiscal flows is to prevent exploitation of, or windfalls to,
any governmental unit and segment of the metropolitan citizenry. The most promising government
structure, because of its flexibility, is a fully developed polycentric system, one in which political-economic empowerment is gained through variously sized public organizations that can effectively
manage their externalities.

There is good news and bad news for the proponents of this vision of unending competition for public
resources. The bad news is that local officials in large cities and urban counties, managers of bureaucratic
public monopolies, oppose in every way possible the formation of new, competing, independent centers of
public power within their jurisdictions. In response to the proposal by the Carter Administration to give
neighborhoods "equal standing" with other governments for direct federal funding, the U.S. Conference of
Mayors branded the plan as one that would threaten "progress and harmony" in the cities--and nothing's
changed since then. The good news is that while the urban tax base may in places be insufficient for
neighborhoods to become full service providers, prospects are good for gap-filling roles in producing and
distributing goods and services. The potential for service divisibility, accumulation of resources through
enterprise, and fiscal equalization strategies has been well demonstrated in the urban development and
decentralization experiments of the last four decades.

Fiscal Equalization Strategies

There are two especially promising strategies for equalizing fiscal resources, apart from shifting the
regulatory, program, or service functions of municipal government to higher levels, as with the transfer of
city hospitals to county administration. Equalization may be achieved by delivering services in
neighborhoods but transferring upwards the responsibility for taxing and financing. Financing of public
education has moved a long way in that direction.

The State of California now funds 60 percent of local public school
education. The federal government funds 10 percent, local governments fund 28.5
percent, and the state lottery funds 1.5 percent. Prior to 1973 school funds
came primarily from property taxes, and funding levels per pupil varied greatly.
In 1973 the California Supreme Court in Serrano v. Priest ruled that students in
areas with low property values were being denied equal educational opportunities
as compared to students in areas with high property values. Based on the Serrano
decision, the State began to equalize wealth-related differences among school
districts and established a system of revenue-limit control formulas (SB 90).
The formulas limited the amount districts could derive from property taxes and
provided a basic dollar amount per unit of Average Daily Attendance, plus an
adjustment factor for any special needs funding. An equalization or inflation
factor was also added, which was higher for low-revenue districts and lower for
high-revenue districts.

In 1977 California Assembly Bill 65 established a program that allowed districts
to spend a minimum amount per pupil, with the State picking up the difference
(i.e., equalizing) if a district could not raise the minimum amount on its own.
If the property tax component for a school district equaled or exceeded its
revenue limit, due to high property values, they were permitted to keep all of
this money. However, the California Constitution requires that the State must
give each school district a minimum of $120 per pupil in basic State aid. If a
district's property values are so high that the State only provides it with
basic aid, it is referred to as Basic Aid District.

In 1978 Proposition 13 drastically altered California's property tax system by
(1) rolling back assessed values to 1975 levels, (2) limiting the tax rates to
one percent of assessed value and, (3) limiting the annual increases in assessed
value to either the lesser of (a) two percent or (b) the change in the Consumer
Price Index. Until this time about two thirds of revenues for schools were
provided through property taxes. In response to Proposition 13, legislation was
enacted that shifted much of the property taxes previously allocated to public
schools to the other areas of local government and made up most of the losses to
schools with State funds (AB 8). Thus school district revenue limits were
transformed from a cap on local tax revenues into an entitlement that guaranteed
districts a certain level of general purpose funding. The net effect was that
districts, with the exception of Basic Aid Districts, now depended primarily on
State aid, since local property taxes were no longer sufficient.

In the early 1980s the State began providing additional equalization funding,
which was incorporated into districts' general-purpose entitlements. In response
to schools' reliance on State funds, Proposition 98 (1988) amended provisions of
the State Constitution to set a guaranteed minimum funding level for K-12
education and the California community colleges equal to the greater of (1) a
specified percent of the State's General Fund revenues or (2) the amount
provided in the prior year, adjusted for growth in students and inflation.
Proposition 98 is now responsible for a majority of school funding.

Federal and state financing takes many forms, and several of them could be aimed at neighborhood
governments. Former U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield (R-Oregon), for example, introduced legislation to fund
neighborhood governments by way of a Federal income tax credit. Presumably it failed to pass for lack of
an organized constituency. The individual taxpayer in Hatfield's plan would receive a dollar-for-dollar
credit against Federal income tax for "contributions" to recognized neighborhood governments. It has
been proposed that state sales taxes be rebated to neighborhood governments for implementing state-recommended improvement programs. And financial assistance might be given with vouchers that can be
cashed only by neighborhood jurisdictions.

A second way of equalizing resources among competing urban governments is known as tax-base-growth-sharing, a plan to share future growth of the urban tax base. State enabling legislation for this
approach was adopted by Minnesota in 1971. The plan there takes 40 percent of the annual increase in
non-residential property tax assessments within a metropolitan jurisdiction, pooling those resources at the
area-wide level, then redistributing them back to all contributing jurisdictions on a formula tied directly to
population and inversely to current per capita assessed valuations in each area.

Although not equalization strategies per se, among the least recognized possibilities for fiscal
empowerment of neighborhood governments are locally generated resources. The resource base for urban
governments can be considerably expanded by neighborhood sponsorship of public enterprise and by
effective control of public bads.

Going Backward or Forward

Secession is not the solution for what ails us. It's a backward step based on a 19th century theory and
practice of local government. Instead of one unresponsive bureaucratized polity, we'll have two--or three
or four or more; instead of the clear advantages of near-metropolitan boundaries, we'll have fragmented
and economically dysfunctional jurisdictions that correspond to districts within the City.

One of the worst potential outcomes of this misguided initiative is the inevitable increase in
alienation and despair it will produce among the majority of low- to middle-income residents of the City.
How long should we imagine it will take, given the most likely eventualities, before the majority of the
citizens realize that little or nothing has changed for them--services no better, regulatory activity no
fairer, opportunities for grassroots communal enterprise no greater, and political and bureaucratic
decision-making no more accessible? The probable and most ironic outcome of a successful secession of
the San Fernando Valley is that its citizens will be more alienated than ever from their "local
government."

What makes such a result all the more outrageous is that few of the proponents of secession are
primarily interested in "good government"--we have budding political careerists, self-serving
entrepreneurs, and self-promoting media--but what we don't have is a movement of the people, by the
people, and for the people. Instead, we have a movement of, by, and for the special interests, pluralities,
and elites.

When and if the citizens of Los Angeles decide to move forward and take their governance into
their own hands, hopefully they will begin with a vision of two-tier government in which we the people
have at least one hand on the handles of public power.

What are the prospects for this vision of citizen empowerment in Los Angeles? Admittedly they
are few and far between at present. There is no organized constituency and it's patently not in the interests
of those constituencies that are organized. Yet it's not far fetched to imagine that as the conditions of life
in Los Angeles become more punishing for the majority, while simultaneously our dissatisfaction with the
City intensifies, a movement will be aborning, eventually organizing itself for action to bring about
structural, self-empowering reform. The double irony is that, eventually, the disappointment with
secession will almost certainly contribute energy to that movement.

Notes

* Rabbi Moshe ben Asher, Ph.D., has been a professional community organizer for more than three decades.
"He is
currently co-director of Gather the People and teaches community organizing at California State University Long Beach and California State University Dominguez Hills.

2.Alexis de Tocqueville, American Institutions and their Influence (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1851).

3. For a case study that casts municipal reform in a positive light, see Jane S. Dahlberg, The New York Bureau of Municipal Research
(New York: New York University Press, 1966).

4. See Vincent Ostrom, The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989).

5. For a less than idealized view of municipal reform, see Robert L. Bish and Vincent Ostrom, Understanding Urban Government:
Metropolitan Reform Reconsidered (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1973).

6. See Vincent Ostrom, The Political Theory of a Compound Republic: Designing the American Experiment (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1987).

7. For a seminal work in this vein, see Robert L. Bish, The Public Economy of Metropolitan Areas (Chicago: Markham Publishing, 1971).

8. For a general survey, see Glen O. Robinson, American Bureaucracy: Public Choice and Public Law (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1991).

9. For example, see Guy Gilbert and Pierre Picard, "Incentives and Optimal Size of Local Jurisdictions," European Economic Review,
40:19-41 (January 1996).

10. For a recent related op-ed statement of concern, see Frank del Olmo, "L.A.'s Next [Police] Chief Should Listen to What the Community
Wants," Los Angeles Times (April 14, 2002).

12. See "Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street," an award-winning documentary film (available on videocassette) about the
community organizing and development that revitalized the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston (Ho-ho-kus, NJ: New Day Films, 1996).

13. This is in contrast to the Catholic doctrine of a "preferential option for the poor," which ensures that, "In every economic, political, and
social decision, a weighted concerned must be given to the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable."

14. That is, not offset by tax revenues from the corporate beneficiaries.